August 22, 2018

Reading Partners brings a love of reading to summer campers

Reading Partners South Carolina partnered with the City of Charleston and Charleston County School District (CCSD) to provide summer reading intervention to local students. Kids attending summer camps at Arthur W. Christopher Community Center (AWCCC) and Hunley Park Elementary School benefitted from Reading Partners’ summer programs.

These summer programs were an overwhelming success! More than 100 students received one-on-one tutoring. A total of 1,500 sessions were delivered.

We operated a summer reading center at Hunley Park Elementary, one of eight CCSD elementary schools offering summer literacy intervention to third graders at risk of being held back in school. CCSD invited Reading Partners to implement our tutoring and summer backpack programs as part of the Read to Succeed initiative. The stakes are high for these struggling readers, making this work incredibly important. More than 36 tutors helped make reading fun and engaging for these third graders over their six weeks together.

We also continued our partnership, launched in 2017, with the City of Charleston and the Mayor’s Office for Children, Youth, and Families at the AWCCC summer camp, fully integrating Reading Partners curriculum into the daily activities of camp-goers. The city sponsors this camp to keep students occupied with activities and supervision during summer months. The camp, and the Reading Partners program, had an impact on our students and volunteers alike – take Jon and Liam for example.

Jon got involved with Reading Partners because he wanted have positive impact in his community.

Working with kids is very refreshing…children are almost always enthusiastic, optimistic, and honest.

As a substitute teacher, our summer program at Arthur W. Christopher Community Center was the perfect opportunity for Jon to bond with students, instill a love of learning through reading, and work towards being a full-time science teacher. Never backing down from a challenge, Jon signed up for the afternoon sessions knowing he would need to bring out his best tricks to keep his student, a soon-to-be fifth grader named Liam, engaged and excited about learning.

Jon believes that in the right context, all kids can enjoy reading, “They almost all like the idea of finding out new things about the world.” Jon nurtured that curiosity in Liam, reading information texts like “Moonshot,” multiple times to learn new facts about the Apollo mission to the moon while improving Liam’s fluency and ability to sound out words. As an educator, Jon was keenly aware of the impact the program had on maintaining literacy skills for Liam and other students as well as keeping his teaching techniques sharp, “A lot of children don’t get any opportunities to read, practice vocabulary and spelling, or otherwise engage in similarly enriching activities over the summer…this program is an invaluable resource to students, schools, and parents alike.”